Chapter Iii Role of Consciousness in Dignaga's
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CHAPTER III ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN DIGNAGA'S SCHOOL 1. Roots of Dignaga's school in Yogacara-Vijnanavada Dignaga was a Buddhist philosopher whose main period of literary activity was in the first half of the sixth century. Although the early part of his career seems to have been devoted to produce the exegetical tracts on various aspects of Mahayana Buddhist doctrines and investigating various issues in epistemology and polemical critiques of rival philosophical systems. Dignaga is supposed to have lived around the years 480-540 A.D.' He was bom in a Brahmana family in south India near KaiicT (in the present Madras state) and was ordained by a teacher of the VatsTputriya school. Being dissatisfied with the doctrine of that school, he left his teacher and traveled to the North. He became a pupil of Vasubandhu, and under the influence of that great scholar, he obtained mastery of the Vijiianavada theory and of logic (Nydya), the field in which he excelled. As Hattori said that what we can say with certainty is that Dignaga was well conversant with Vasubandhu's works. The Abhidharmakosa, of which he made an abridgment, is referred to in the Pramanasamuccaya. He wrote a commentary on the Vadavidhana of Vasubandhu. In composing the Nyayamukha, he seems to have followed the pattern of Vasubandhu's work on logic. In many others of his works we can point out the influence of Vasubandhu's Sautrantic and Yogacaric thoughts.^ Dignaga's great contribution to Indian logic is his invention of the Hetucakra, that is, the table which shows nine possible relations between the Reason (hetu) and the Sddhyadharma or predicate of the thesis (paksa, sddhya) to be proved. This invention makes clear in which cases a certain Reason is valid ' But Hattori had fixed Dignaga's date at 470-530 A.D. in the article ''The Dates of Dignaga and His Milieu", p. 79-96. M. Hattori., Dignaga on Perception, p. 3. 153 and in which cases it is invalid. It was already known to Vasubandhu and even to Asanga that, in inference, a Reason should satisfy three necessary conditions: it must be a property of the Dharmin or subject of the Thesis (pak^adharmatva); it must exist in all or some homogeneous instances (sapakse sattvam); it must never exist in any heterogeneous instance (vipakse' sattvam eva)? Perhaps Dignaga succeeded in making the table while he was examining individual cases of valid and invalid reasons as shown in Vasubandhu's logical treatises/ Dignaga went only one step further than Vasubandhu. Preparatory works had already been done by the latter. Thus with Dignaga the philosophical research of the Yogacara School centers itself specially in logic and theory of knowledge. As it is mentioned in the previous chapter that consciousness aspects with the two divisions which refer to the seeing part (darsana-bhdga) and the form division (nimitta-bhdga); with there aspects consciousness represents itself in the form of subject (grdhaka) and object (grdhya). Thus Asanga and Vasubandhu advocated that consciousness manifests itself into subjects as well as into objects. It arises out of its own seed and then it manifests itself as an external sphere of objects. In the same line of thought, it seems, Dignaga discussion about the consciousness in his fielded. Dignaga based the entire edifice of his epistemology on distinction between the realms of things-in-themselves and commonsense-experience, which they named respectively as svalaksana and sdmdnya-laksana. The former is the sphere of first ultimate (paramdtha-sat), whereas the latter is the sphere of empirical reality (samvrti-sat). The most important point about the distinction between svalaksana and sdmdnya-laksana is that they are contrasted respectively as the non-constructed (nirvikalpa), and the constructed (kalpita), the non-imagined (andropita) and the imagined ' Tucci., Pre-Dignaga Buddhist Texts on Logic from Chinese Sources, p. 13. " See Tucci., Buddhist Logic before Dignaga, p. 451-488. 154 (dropita). This shows that the distinction between sdmdnya-laksana and svalak^ana, and the entire philosophy behind it, were already implied and meant by Asanga and Vasubandhu when they distinguished between parikalpita and parim?panna, or parikalpita-dtma and anabhildya-dtmd. In other words, the central insight of the school of Dignaga was inspired by the school of Asanga and Vasubandhu: the central theme of the former school has kept clear continuity with that of the latter school. This implies a continuity of essential details of the same theme too. Now, Dignaga and his followers thought that a realistic pluralism was essential to their central theme namely, the distinction between svalak?ana and sdmdnya-laksana. Kochumuttam has also pointed that the doctrine presented in the Viinsatika as a seminal influence on the fully developed theories of the pramdfia school of Dignaga. This school holds that the moment of perception (pratyaksa) is essentially pure and free from imagination (kalpandpodha), and A.K. Chatterjee in his work, "'The Yogdcdra Idealism " says, "Their essential teaching was that of the Yogacara as is evident from Dignaga's Alambanapariksa"^, Carmen Dragonetti also said in his work, ''Being as Consciousness''': "The Alambanapanksd is one of the most important texts not only of Dignaga but of the Yogacara School of Buddhism in general. This work together with Vasubandhu's Vimsatika and Trimsika are fundamental texts of the Yogacara School; in them we find expounded the principal philosophical tenets of the school, centered around the thesis of the sole existence of consciousness."^ However, I also think that some of the texts like Pramdnasamuccaya that they take the Yogacaca doctrine as their theoretical basis. While thinking that svasamvedana or svasamvitti is not differentiated as act and result, Dignaga and Dharmaklrti both are presupposing the doctrine of ' Chatterjee, Ashok Kumar., The Yogacara Idealism, p. 41. * Fenando Tola Carmen Dragonetti., Being as Consciousness (Yogacara Philosophy of Buddhism), p. 11. 155 Vijnaptimatratd of the Yogdcdras. According to this theory the expressions dtman, dharma, etc. which stand for subject and object, are really metaphors applied to the transformation of the consciousness {yijhdnaparindma). In reality there is neither subject nor object -they are simply constructions of imagination. When one attains the stage of Ultimate Reality one will avoid this imaginary distinction and will realize the state of pure consciousness iyijnaptimdtra) which is free from all sorts of dichotomies. Keeping such theory of pure consciousness in mind the Buddhist Logicians regard that for empirical purposes the undifferentiated fact of svasamvedana is presented in the form of the difference between pramdna and prameya. Thus we see that in the epistemological context the Buddhists are attempting to provide a rational frame for human practice so that it becomes meaningful both in everyday life and in the pursuit of the ultimate goal indicated by Lord Buddha. 2. On DignSga's Epistemology The basic set of intuitions inherited by Dignaga is perhaps most clear in Dignaga's Alambanapariksd (Examination of Intentional Objects). In this short text, Dignaga argues that cognition can be explained satisfactorily if we posit mental phenomena as the "objects" intended thereby—and, indeed, that we cannot coherently posit any nonmental, external objects as what is directly intended by cognition. The latter is true, for Dignaga, insofar as any account of external objects necessarily presupposes some version of minimal part atomism, which Dignaga argues cannot be adduced coherently to explain our cognition of macro-objects. Dignaga's argument here clearly owes something to Vasubandhu's later Yogacara work, the Vimsatika.^ As with the latter work, there is considerable scholarly disagreement over whether Dignaga is best understood as arguing here for an idealist metaphysics or simply for ' Kapstein., On Vasubandhu's argument against atomism in the Vimsatika, p. 181-204. 156 something like a representationalist epistemology involving sense-data (which allows the possibility of bracketing the question of what might finally exist in the world). Nevertheless, what is most relevant here is a clear allusion by Dignaga to o the passage from Vasubandhu (considered above) on the "two truths." Arguing that there is an unbridgeable gap between atoms as the putative cause of cognition and medium-sized dry goods as the content thereof, Dignaga says: "Things like jars are conventionally existent, because if the atoms are removed, the cognition that appears with respect to them is destroyed. In the case of what is substantially existent, such as color, even when one has taken away what is connected with it, there is no removal of the cognition of the color itself."' Like Vasubandhu, Dignaga thus argues that what qualifies medium-sized dry goods (of which jars are a standard Indian example) as merely "conventionally existent" {samvrti-sat) is the fact of their being reducible, while the constituent aspects to which they can be reduced (such as "color") in turn exist "substantially" {dravyatah). In the Pramanasamuccaya, Dignaga alludes to the same discussion, this time explicitly putting the issue in terms of what is "ultimately existent" [paramdrthasat). Thus, arguing that a cognition cannot properly be named after the object that produces it, Dignaga says: "that cognifion which possesses the appearance of a given gross form is not produced from that external object; because in the case of a gross form's being cognized the five kinds of sense-cognition take for their object the aggregate of atoms, which, being unreal, has no faculty of presenting its form in a cognition. On the other hand, if a cognition be produced from an object, that object must be a real entity, and what is real is unnamable in the ultimate sense because it is an invisible atom. Hence the cognition produced from that object cannot be named after the object." ' AKB. VI.4, p.